Brave New Museum: The Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney

Abstract

The Chau Chak Wing Museum opened on 18 November 2020. Located at one of the main entrances to the University of Sydney, the new building flanks the brutalist Fisher Library, faces the nineteenth-century Quadrangle, and looks out over the city of Sydney, a positioning that embodies the pastiche of its holdings. Since it was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, the University has acquired large holdings of material culture from across the globe. These diverse collections span science, photography, natural history, anthropology, archaeology, and fine art. Most were donated by wealthy individuals and families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were formerly managed within the Macleay Museum, the Nicholson Museum and the University Art Gallery, separate institutions with their own complex identities and histories. The Chau Chak Wing Museum (henceforth the Museum) brings these collections together for the first time. At the broadest conceptual level, the Museum applies interdisciplinary and relational approaches to its exhibits to situate its objects, many acquired in radically different times from now, within the latest museological methodologies and theories. It engages with the ongoing legacies of the colonial enterprise of collecting while also exploring contemporary issues such as climate change and First Nations sovereignty. This review focuses on a few of the 2021 exhibitions that best represent the Museum’s curatorial intent and the re-contextualisation of its collections. The most stimulating exhibit is undoubtedly ‘Ambassadors’. Eight site-specific displays, co-curated with First Nations communities and encompassing twenty-five language groups from across Australia, are dispersed throughout the exhibition spaces. This distributed approach celebrates the plurality of First Nations cultures, while quotes from knowledge custodians in the interpretive text activate their voices throughout the Museum. Each ‘Ambassadors’ display encourages a meaningful dialogue with other exhibits nearby. To cite just one example, the ‘Aalingoon’ showcase, relating to the Kimberley in northwest Western Australia, is located in Coastline, a fine art exhibition exploring different understandings of this littoral space. ‘Aalingoon’, which means ‘scales of the rainbow serpent’ in the Bardi language, explores the role of Riji (carved pearl shell) in long-distance gift exchange, examining the First Peoples’ connections to the sea and complementing the exhibition’s rationale. ‘Ambassadors’ is a highly innovative and successful approach that centres First Nations peoples, cultures, and histories at the heart of the Museum and its narrative. In its first year, the Museum also hosted Gululu Dhuwala Djalkiri: Welcome to the Yolŋu Foundations. The result of a collaboration with Yolŋu elders and three art centres in Arnhem Land, this included co-curation and the complete re-organisation of the Yolŋu materials in the Museum’s stores. Displayed in the Ian Potter Gallery, the works, which date from the 1920s to 2016, include bark paintings, a canoe, sculptures, and multimedia, and represent more than one hundred artists and twenty Yolŋu clans. The effective use of colour in the exhibition design – with red, pink, yellow and blue evoking the land and sea and distinguishing the different clans and moieties represented – creates an immersive environment for the visitor. The inclusion of painted hollow-log memorial poles acquired at the 2016 Milingimbi Makarraṯa, a peace-making event between Yolŋu communities and museums, asserts the Museum’s role as a culturally safe place for custodianship and collaboration. The Museum also confronts its role as custodian of the largest collection of antiquities in the southern hemisphere by actively encouraging its visitors to reflect on the Western